We’ve finished fixing up the major outstanding issues with the MDN wiki, and I thought I’d take a few minutes to write down what’s new and what still needs to be fixed. Let’s start with the bad news: the handful of remaining issues we need to fix. All of them are, fortunately, entirely cosmetic. Yay!

Things that need fixing

Currently, there’s a bug in the skin on the site that causes the toolbar to wander down toward the bottom of the window as you scroll. We know what’s wrong there and hopefully it will be fixed very soon.

The stylesheet used while editing doesn’t match the one used while viewing content, so the text doesn’t look the way it ought to.

The <title> block on user pages is not currently set correctly, so titles of user pages are not informative.

Column layout in certain search result and tag listing pages is not correct, resulting in truncated or badly overlapping titles.

The tag list has a stray pair of parentheses after it at the bottom of the page.

Stuff we got in this upgrade

This was a pretty major upgrade; we jumped all the way from 9.2.3 through 10.0 to 10.1.1. As such, we have a lot of exciting improvements to enjoy. I’ll touch on the ones that I find most interesting for our usage:

The editor is now CKEditor 3.0, which is faster and more flexible. Among other things, we now have:

Improved performance.

Support for viewing the blocks in the editor.

A preview button, although it doesn’t render out templates, so it’s not as useful as it could be for our needs.

Local auto-saving of drafts! Your work gets periodically saved locally on your computer, and if you lose power or accidentally quit, you can resume where you left off.

A much improved toolbar, with a Code button — complete with a Ctrl-O key equivalent — and individual buttons for H1 through H3. Check it out!

Ctrl-S toggles source view mode.

While I was at it, I got rid of some cruft we don’t use out of the toolbar.

Editing of titles has been improved; it’s no longer part of the page content, but a separate editing box. You can also decouple (or re-couple) the title and the URL path of articles.

When you go to your user page, you now see a dashboard showing your recent activity. Your custom content is in a separate tab on that page.

The tagging user interface is improved — and is much faster.

The Move Page dialog box has been reworded to be less confusing to use.

Overall performance seems noticeably better.

If you try to edit a page on an iPad, you now can (although only in source mode). Still, in a pinch, it’s better than nothing.

Infrastructure exists for page rankings and comments; we have these features disabled for now but may enable them later.

Similarly, the built-in search system has been vastly improved but we’re currently not using it. We may soon.

Cross your fingers

Here’s hoping this upgrade helps with some of the problems folks have been having. It took us a couple of days to get things working, but I think it will be worth it. Let me know, or file bugs, if you run into any problems not mentioned above.